1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plasma display device, and more particularly, to an apparatus for driving a plasma display panel (PDP).
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, plasma display panels (PDPs) cause discharges in a plurality of electrodes installed in a discharge space by applying a voltage to the electrodes and thus display an image by exciting phosphors with the aid of plasma generated by the discharges.
PDPs are easy to be implemented as large-scale thin display devices. In addition, since PDPs have a simple structure, it is possible to facilitate the manufacture of PDPs. Moreover, PDPs can provide higher luminance and higher light-emitting efficiency than most other flat panel displays.
PDPs are generally driven in a time-division manner in which the operating time of PDPs are divided into a reset period for initializing all discharge cells, an address period for selecting a number of discharge cells to be discharged, and a sustain period for causing a sustain discharge in each of the selected discharge cells.
However, PDPs are highly likely to be oversaturated with electric charge and may thus suffer from afterimage-type bright spots due to the occurrence of a strong discharge during the set-down period of a reset signal. In addition, such strong discharge may cause the switching of scan electrodes and the switching of sustain electrodes to be performed at the same time, and thus, various problems such as voltage peaking or generation of complement-color bright spots may arise. As a result, the reliability of PDPs may generally decrease.